ASUS’ CEO confirmed the existence of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer 2 earlier this month calling it “impressive” but so far there’s no details on it. The only bit of info we’ve got are rumors from the manufacturing industry that pin it’s launch sometime in October. Today, Fudzilla has confirmed with multiple sources what most people have suspected – it’ll indeed have Kal El, the name for Nvidia’s next generation SoC after Tegra 2 which may possibly be called Tegra 3.In addition to having Kal-El, the Eee Pad Transformer 2 is confirmed by the same sources to be the first Kal El tablet on the block.

The quad-core Kal El (1.5GHz) has recently being touted as having much improved battery life over Tegra 2 in part due to better power management on the software side and having anti-aliasing support besides its obviously superior performance (5x more). There are at least five tablet / tablet hybrid design wins utilizing Kal El according to Nvidia. Kal El was expected to hit in August but that’s been delayed but it’s expected to hit well before Thanksgiving in the US, so perhaps late October, and just in line with this tablet’s launch.

If they come with this at the same price point and longer battery life than the original it will fly off the shelves.
I wonder if asus will keep the current pricing for the gen1 for a while and go toe-to-toe with ipad on pricing for this gen2 unit.
Anyway – if the nvidia claims are true then this could be the first tablet to actually beat up on ipad a bit. Seems like ipad3 has been kept to traditional release schedule due to parts availability according to net rumors.
A kal-el holiday season against ipad2 might just cost apple some much coveted market share.

Anonymous

To be clear:

Your quad vs dual core idea assumes all other things being equal in the chip design.
I don’t think nvidia (or anyone else) has said that is the case here. It also assumes your ‘same process’ has been made different to actually run on four cores.
3x CPU, 2x GPU sounds great.

Anonymous

To be clear:

Your quad vs dual core idea assumes all other things being equal in the chip design.
I don’t think nvidia (or anyone else) has said that is the case here. It also assumes your ‘same process’ has been made different to actually run on four cores.
3x CPU, 2x GPU sounds great.